drifted (...) into a vortex of more old-fashioned esoteric ideas, drawn from the occult, numerology, the fathomless novels of the American horror writer HP Lovecraft, and the life of the English mystic Aleister Crowley, who had been born in Leamington, in a cavernous terraced house which several members moved into.

Even inside the permissive Warwick philosophy department, the CCRU’s ever more blatant disdain for standard academic practice became an issue. CCRU became a "very divisive" presence in the philosophy department. "Most of the department really hated and despised [them]"

Ccru ... triggers itself from October 1995, when it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat ... Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchersSimon Reynolds

Ccru was an entity ... irreducible to the agendas, or biographies, of its component sub-agencies ... Utter submission to The Entity was key.Nick Land

We made up an arrow! There was almost no disharmony. There was no leisure. We tried not to be apart from each other. No one dared let the side down. When everyone is keeping up with everyone else, the collective element increased is speed.Iain Hamilton Grant

Accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.

Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative. Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government.

For decades longer than more orthodox contemporary thinkers, accelerationists have been focused on many of the central questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries: the rise of China; the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means to be human in an era of addictive, intrusive electronic devices; the seemingly uncontrollable flows of global markets; the power of capitalism as a network of desires; the increasingly blurred boundary between the imaginary and the factual; the resetting of our minds and bodies by ever-faster music and films; and the complicity, revulsion and excitement so many of us feel about the speed of modern life.

Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down they say it needs to be kickstarted. Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering "false" solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is "always promised and always just out of reach".

It was in France in the late 1960s that accelerationist ideas were first developed in a sustained way. Shaken by the failure of the leftwing revolt of 1968, and by the seemingly unending postwar economic boom in the west, some French Marxists decided that a new response to capitalism was needed.

For a tiny number of British philosophers, the two books were a revelation. "I couldn’t believe it! For a book by a Marxist to say, ‘There’s no way out of this’, meaning capitalism, and that we are all tiny pieces of engineered desire, that slot into a huge system – that’s a first, as far as I know."

Such exploratory philosophy projects were tolerated at Warwick in a way they were not at other British universities. Warwick had been founded in the 1960s as a university that would experiment and engage with the contemporary world. By the 1990s, its original ethos lived on in some departments, such as philosophy, where studying avant-garde French writers was the norm. At the centre of this activity was a new young lecturer in the department, Nick Land.

By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. [Mas] Land was in some ways quite old-fashioned. His initial Warwick writings contained far more references to 18th- and 19th-century philosophers – Friedrich Nietzsche was a fixation – than to contemporary thinkers or culture. The Warwick version of accelerationism did not crystallise fully until other radicals arrived in the philosophy department in the mid-90s. Sadie Plant was one of them. Mark Fisher was another incomer.

Like Land, Plant and Fisher had both read the French accelerationists and were increasingly hostile to the hold they felt traditional leftwing and liberal ideas had on British humanities departments, and on the world beyond. Unlike Land, Plant and Fisher were technophiles.

Ao $$$, junta-se a tech.

"We saw capitalism and technology as these intense forces that were trying to take over a decrepit body."

With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.

Então, eles, como nós, agora:

The CCRU’s aim was to meld their preoccupations into a groundbreaking, infinitely flexible intellectual alloy.

III

"a machine for countering pessimism"

Half a dozen years later, at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, Nick Srnicek, began reading a British blog about pop culture and politics called k-punk. K-punk had been going since 2003, and had acquired a cult following among academics and music critics for its unselfconscious roaming from records and TV shows to recent British history and French philosophy. K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog gradually shed the CCRU’s aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology when it should have been exploiting it.

There was a feeling that Land had taken the philosophy in inappropriate directions

Other accelerationists now distance themselves from Land

"I try not to read his stuff"

Since Warwick, Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about "human biodiversity" and "capitalistic human sorting" – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races "naturally" fare differently in the modern world.

On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself.

Celebrating speed and technology has its risks. A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism. While some futurist works are still admired, the movement’s reputation has never recovered.